Tag: The Wizard of Oz

Travel Films Week: Why I Reject the Ending of ‘The Wizard of Oz’

Written by Lady T.  

Dorothy and friends skip to the Emerald City
The Wizard of Oz is my favorite movie. There are movies that are more artistically accomplished, movies that are more sophisticated, and funnier films that make me laugh my butt off, but no film I’ve seen has the same sentimental, emotional effect on me as The Wizard of Oz.
I love this movie as I love no other movie. And I hate the ending.
Let me explain.  
The plot of the movie is fairly straightforward. Dorothy and her three male companions go on the same quest: to meet the Wizard of Oz. Each member of the original Fab Four has a different reason to meet the Wizard. The Scarecrow wants a brain, the Tin Man wants a heart, the Cowardly Lion wants courage, and Dorothy wants to go home to her Auntie Em and Uncle Henry in Kansas.
In the end, their quests prove to be unnecessary, and not just because the Wizard is a charlatan who cannot give the characters what they desire. As it turns out, each character already possesses the quality he or she was seeking. The Scarecrow doesn’t need a brain — he’s already the smartest person in the group, a quick thinker and problem-solver who comes up with the plans to break into the Wicked Witch’s castle. The Tin Man doesn’t need a heart — he’s already emotional, crying whenever his friends are in trouble. The Lion doesn’t need someone to give him courage — he already steps up to every challenge that’s presented to him, even when it scares him. And Dorothy doesn’t need to go home — she’s been there the whole time, because the entire colorized section of The Wizard of Oz was all just a dream!
BOOOOO. (Just to make myself perfectly clear, I am, in fact, saying “Boooo!” and not “Boo-urns!”)

“Wait – I thought it was a trip, but I was really just tripping?”

I hate “it was just a dream!” endings on principle, because if the entire conflict takes place in the main character’s head, there’s no real urgency, nothing really at stake.
I hate that the message — “What you thought you wanted is something you really had all along!” – is applied differently to Dorothy than it is to her friends. The Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion are told that they always had a brain, a heart, and courage, and the Wizard giving them their “gifts” is affirmation of their strengths. Dorothy, on the other hand, gets a lecture from Glinda and has to realize that “if I ever look for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard.” Her friends get to realize that they were always smart, emotional, and brave, while she has to learn a lesson about being grateful for what she already has.
I hate the ending because it breaks my heart to think that Dorothy’s friendships were all a product of her fantasy.

Dorothy yearns for life somewhere over the rainbow

The truth is, Dorothy doesn’t have a bad life on her farm in Kansas. Her aunt and uncle love her and take care of her, and the hired hands on her aunt and uncle’s farm treat her with kindness and consideration. I don’t mind that she takes a minute to appreciate that and realizes that running away is not the best idea.
But even though a loving family is invaluable, guardians are not the same thing as friends.
In Oz, Dorothy has friends and equals. She and the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion share the same adventures and support each other. She invites them on her quest to find the Wizard, giving them hope where they had none before, and in turn, they save her from the clutches of the Wicked Witch of the West. They don’t treat her differently because she’s a girl; any concern they have for her is because they fear for her life in an enemy’s hands, not because they doubt her abilities or strength.
There’s mutual respect and love among Dorothy and her friends and equals, something she doesn’t have in Kansas because there’s no one her age to relate to her — and we’re supposed to happily swallow that this is all just a dream, and there’s no place like home?
Well, I don’t accept it. I refuse. In my mental version of the ending, Oz is real. Dorothy traveled there and came back, and even though she has a renewed appreciation for her day-to-day life, the door is still open for her to return, where the new rulers of Oz — the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion — will all be waiting for her, ready to go on their next adventure.

Dorothy and her three best friends


Lady T is an a writer and aspiring comedian with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at The Funny Feminist, where she picks apart entertainment and reviews movies she hasn’t seen.

No, ‘Oz the Great and Powerful,’ We Don’t Need More Male-Centric Fairy Tales

Written by Megan Kearns.

After seeing Oz the Great and Powerful, I was annoyed. And angry.

Everything in the film revolves around one dude: James Franco as Oscar Diggs aka Oz. Bleh. It’s a patriarchal dream come true.

Women in the film fawn over Oz, swoon over him, make googly eyes at him, get enraged by him and arguably wreck their lives because of him. Glinda (Michelle Williams), Evanora (Rachel Weisz) and Theodora (Mila Kunis) all repeat throughout the film that Oz is there to save them. Even after Glinda who’s wise to his shenanigans, knows he’s not really a wizard, she still perpetuates the façade that he’s a savior, the one person who will bring the land salvation. Oz literally puts a female character, the broken China Girl, back together. Oz catalyzes Theodora’s destructive transformation from naïve and sweet, albeit with a quick temper, to heartless and wicked. Oh and of course we get women pitted against each other. Just for funsies.

The film is boring and vapid. The tissue-thin characters lack depth, wasting the tremendous talents of Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams and Mila Kunis. Hideous gender stereotypes get tossed around. In her fantastic review, Natalie Wilson points out the film’s many weaknesses, including reinforcing the trope that women are wicked and erasing the feminism of the books.

One of the reasons that made Wicked and The Wizard of Ozso special — they focus on the women for a change. As Bitch Flicks writer Myrna Waldron astutely points out, the Oz series boasts powerful women in leadership roles. The women aren’t princesses (aside from Princess Ozma in the books of course). The women are either “ordinary” or witches, dismantling the “all witches are evil” trope. The women in Oz lead, give advice, scheme, make decisions on their own, go on journeys, forge friendships. They may work cooperatively with men but they don’t sit around and wait for men to save them.

So how did this happen? How did a female-centric, feminist series devolve into male pandering? It comes down to an aspect of the film’s production that to the best of my knowledge I haven’t seen anyone else raise: the need for “a fairy tale with a good strong male protagonist.”

Producer Joe Roth — who didn’t realize The Wizard of Oz was just the first in a series of 14 books, — shares what drew him to develop Oz the Great and Powerful:

“When [screenwriter] Mitchell [Kapner] starts talking about that man behind the curtain and how he got there, this storyline immediately strikes me as a great idea for a movie for a couple of reasons. One was because I love The Wizard of Oz. But this character is only in the last few minutes of that film and we have no idea who he is.

“And the second reason was — during the years that I spent running Walt Disney Studios — I learned about how hard it was to find a fairy tale with a good strong male protagonist. You’ve got your Sleeping Beauties, your Cinderellas and your Alices. But a fairy tale with a male protagonist is very hard to come by. But with the origin story of the Wizard of Oz, here was a fairy tale story with a natural male protagonist. Which is why I knew that this was an idea for a movie that was genuinely worth pursuing.”



So only films with a “natural male protagonist” are worth pursuing? Roth has also produced Alice in Wonderland, Snow White and the Huntsman and the upcoming Angelina Jolie film Maleficent – all female-centric fairy-tale films. So maybe he’s tired of all the ladies. And of course he can personally pursue any story he wants. But to take such an iconic series with a plucky female protagonist, full of complex female characters and a female ruler (Ozma) and then strip it of its female empowerment and nuance all to focus on a dude?? Stop. Just stop.

What’s great about Dorothy is she’s not a princess. She’s a “regular” girl on a quest and an emotional journey, something we too often see men and boys embark on. Now I understand if they didn’t want to rival the Judy Garland classic. But why not film one of the other books in the series? Or why not film the musical Wicked, a story revolving around the bonds of female friendship?

So what about Roth’s assertion, that it’s difficult to find male leads in fairy tale films? Nope, it’s really not that hard. Jack the Giant Slayer, Shrek, Aladdin, Mickey and the Beanstalk, Pinocchio, Peter Pan, The Sword in the Stone, Hercules, hell even Beauty and the Beast all feature male leads in fairy tale films.

As I’ve written before when I wrote about my excitement for Brave, too many children’s films, particularly animated films, don’t feature girls and women in leading roles. “Originally titled Rapunzel, Disney’s Tangled, the most recent animated film featuring a girl, was renamed a gender-neutral title to be less girl-centric. Its marketing didn’t just focus on Rapunzel but featured “bad-boy” thief Flynn Ryder in order to lure a male audience. Male characters dominate animated films.” Wreck-It Ralph, Ice Age, Rango, Kung Fu Panda and aside from Bravethe entire pantheon of Pixar’s films (Toy Story, Up, Wall-E, etc.), put male roles front and center.

As of 2010, “family films exhibited a gender disparity as only 29% of speaking roles belonged to female characters in the top grossing films within the past few years.” Superhero films (Spiderman, Iron Man, Batman, The Avengers aside from Black Widow), and swashbuckling adventures (Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars) — all with huge audiences of children — also feature male protagonists. Most movies for kids are just sexism in training.

In fairy tale films, the female characters we do see are princesses (Brave, Snow White and the Huntsman, The Little Mermaid, The Princess and the Frog, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty). While there’s nothing wrong with having characters as princesses — and with Brave we got a huge step for female empowerment — as a collective they contribute to princess culture. Princess culture typically celebrates female objectification, reifying the stereotype that women’s and girls’ worth should be tied to their beauty. It also perpetuates the pressure of perfection — women and girls must be everything to everyone. And princess culture follows girls into womanhood with wedding obsessions and the fairy tale myth of finding Prince Charming.

In too many films for both children and adults, female characters’ fall into tropes of damsels in distress, femme fatales, and manic pixie dream girls. Their stories often revolve around men, just like in Oz. The women talk about men. They wax about finding love. They yearn to be rescued, looking to men to fix their lives. 

With the pervasive lack of female protagonists, media implies that girls and women don’t matter. It teaches girls they should serve as supporting roles in real life, rather than lead themselves. In a film with three powerful sorceresses, the message shouldn’t be that a “good man” can save us all.

So no, we don’t need any more films, fairy-tale or otherwise, revolving around men.

The Oz Series & The Power of Women

Oz: The Great and Powerful Poster (Source: firstshowing.net)

Today, I’m going to rant about a film that hasn’t even come out yet. Most of you are probably aware that a prequel to The Wizard of Oz entitled Oz The Great and Powerful will be coming out this spring. James Franco has reunited with the original Spider-Man trilogy’s director Sam Raimi to play Oscar Diggs, the future Wizard of Oz. Those who have seen the 1939 film (and I’d wager just about everyone has) know that The Wizard is a fraud who has been flim-flamming the residents of Oz with illusions, pyrotechnics and some serious fast-talking.
Now, the trailer is beautiful. I thought it was really clever how the journey from Kansas to Oz gradually transitioned from black & white fullscreen to full colour widescreen. (Though if this is a prequel to the 1939 canon that’s a continuity error – The Wizard is from Nebraska, not Kansas) Danny Elfman is likely to deliver a good score. The cast is excellent too – the three Witches are played by Rachel Weisz, Mila Kunis and Michelle Williams, and James Franco amuses me. It’s nice to see him playing something besides the stoner James Dean bit he’s been doing since his Freaks & Geeks days (not counting 127 Hours). The film’s visuals are beautiful, and quite obviously inspired by Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland, which looked great…but was a shitty film.
I’m probably going to see Oz The Great and Powerful since I love fantasy movies and have loved the Oz series all my life…but I’m pissed. And all it took was one line in the trailer:
“Are you the great man we’ve been waiting for?” 
Glinda of Oz Novel Cover (Source: Wikipedia)
The Oz series, at least while still written by L. Frank Baum, has always been partly about the power and strength of women. Most significantly, Dorothy Gale, Princess Ozma and the four Witches of the cardinal directions (Glinda especially) are the ones who solve all the problems (obviously not counting the evil ones) and wield all the power. Baum still balances the gender dynamics by having well-written male characters as well. There have been dozens of unofficial sequels (Baum himself wrote 14 Oz books altogether before he died), not even counting revisionist/alternate universe media like Wicked. This film appears to be based on an original story (not one of the novels) and inspired by the 1939 film, and I can tell. The Wicked Witch of the West’s green skin is a dead giveaway, as well as Glinda being blonde and the Witch of the North. In the original novels, the Witch of the West did not have green skin, and Glinda was the redheaded Witch of the South. The 1939 film combined the Witch of the North (who ultimately wasn’t a significant character in the books anyway) and Glinda into one character. Actually, Glinda’s being blonde in this adaptation is telling me that they’re borrowing more than a little bit from Wicked.
Dorothy, Ozma and Glinda serve significant leadership positions in Oz. Princess Ozma is the true hereditary ruler of Oz – her position having been usurped by The Wizard. Glinda is by far the most powerful sorceress in Oz, and both Dorothy and Ozma often defer to her wisdom. Dorothy, of course, is the plucky orphan outsider who combines resourcefulness and bravery. She and Ozma are extremely close best friends – so close, in fact, that many people have done a queer reading of their relationship. It is not just my interpretation of the series that makes it subtextually feminist, L. Frank Baum deliberately wrote it as such. He is the son-in-law of Matilda Gage, a prominent 19th century suffragette. Although the biographic adaptation of Baum’s life, The Dreamer of Oz, painted their relationship as strained and antagonistic (and even implied she was the inspiration for the Witch of the West), he actually deeply admired her for her feminist political beliefs and was directly involved in the women’s suffrage movement as an advocate. Nice attempt at trying to make Gage a Straw Feminist, huh? Dorothy also serves as a memorial to his niece who died in infancy; his wife Maud was so distraught at Dorothy’s death (as she’d always wanted a daughter) Baum named his book’s heroine after her – and it is quite easy to interpret Oz as a symbolic heaven.
Princess Ozma (Source: Wikipedia)
Despite Princess Ozma being one of the most important characters in the entire Oz series, I can only recall two adaptations that even acknowledge she exists (and I’ve seen so many Oz adaptations I can’t remember them all) – cult classic Return To Oz and the 80s anime TV series The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Return To Oz makes her a kind of damsel in distress imprisoned by Princess Mombi, but at least makes the strong friendship between Ozma and Dorothy very clear. The anime TV series has one of the more unusual interpretations of Ozma. As in the original novels, Ozma had been transformed by Mombi (who is a minor witch, not a princess) into a boy named Tip so that no one could ever recognize her. After Glinda reveals who she really is and transforms her back, Ozma remains distinctly tomboyish – suggesting that Ozma’s life as a boy was a lot more absolute than just a physical transformation.
Since Oz The Great and Powerful is a prequel, I doubt they’ll even mention Ozma (never mind Dorothy), especially since they’re apparently going to make Diggs a heroic protagonist. I can’t even put The Wizard’s narrative role into words – he’s not a hero as he’s a fraud and an usurper, but he’s not a villain as he is mostly benevolent. Anti-Villain? I dunno. I don’t want to start talking like a TV Tropes page. What the trailer has implied, however, is that the Witches are going to defer to his authority and apparently prophesied power. What kind of bullshit is that?
Kristen Chenoweth & Idina Menzel in Wicked (Source: last.fm)

If we had to get an Oz prequel adaptation, why did we get this instead of Wicked? Wicked has its flaws, but the musical version echoes the main themes of the original books by making it about a strong friendship between girls/women. What we’ve seemingly got here is a story where three incredibly powerful sorceresses are unable to solve Oz’s problems on their own, and are waiting for a man to save them. A man who is a fraud. Two of the Witches inevitably will become part of the problem – the brunettes in the dark clothing, of course, not the pretty blonde in the pastels. The trailer also suggests that at least one of the Witches (it looks like Mila Kunis) will have a romance with Diggs, cause of course we can’t have women in a story without at least one of them wanting to bang the hero.
I hope the trailer is just being deceptive for marketing purposes. I hope the story isn’t really about powerful women waiting for a man to save them. But I’m not optimistic. The 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz remains one of my favourite movies of all time, and it retains one of Baum’s feminist themes – the women had the power all along. But it’s really distressing me how much this upcoming film relies on the canon of the 1939 adaptation, and doesn’t seem to have considered L. Frank Baum’s novels at all. With fourteen Oz books written by him and dozens of other adaptations/sequels/whatevers out there taking advantage of the Oz series being public domain, why did we need yet another original Oz story? And why, why, why did we need one that heavily implies that three powerful sorceresses need an ordinary man to rescue them? As an Oz series fan…that’s a load of humbug.

Myrna Waldron is a feminist writer/blogger with a particular emphasis on all things nerdy. She lives in Toronto and has studied English and Film at York University. Myrna has a particular interest in the animation medium, having written extensively on American, Canadian and Japanese animation. She also has a passion for Sci-Fi & Fantasy literature, pop culture literature such as cartoons/comics, and the gaming subculture. She maintains a personal collection of blog posts, rants, essays and musings at The Soapboxing Geek, and tweets with reckless pottymouthed abandon at @SoapboxingGeek.